


Don't Stop Having Fun

by Drakey



Series: Truth [7]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, I don't owe anyone any diacritics 'cause they're hard, Implied Bullying, M/M, Padawans, Weird Force Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:21:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24062044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drakey/pseuds/Drakey
Summary: Two children talk to their mentors about becoming Padawans.
Relationships: Ezra Bridger & Kanan Jarrus, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Quinlan Vos, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Series: Truth [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1700803
Comments: 7
Kudos: 61





	Don't Stop Having Fun

**Author's Note:**

> My computer. Ate. Two thousand words. Of this draft.
> 
> Ugh.
> 
> Anyway, here's the bits that I wrote before my harsh reminder of why you should save often.

Caleb Dume watched his future padawan run back and forth across the field. Ezra swatted the ball back and forth, using his superior ability to badly outperform the other boys. It wasn't that he was stronger: some of these boys were two years older than him, and he was naturally small anyway. He wasn't using the Force, either. One of the first rules they'd taught the kids on Lothal was to never use the Force outside of the Conservatorium, and Caleb could feel that Ezra wasn't breaking that rule. Ezra wasn't even more generally athletic. They trained the hell out of the kids, physically, but the intensive training didn't happen until they turned nine and everyone agreed they were old enough to start using a training saber.

The thing was, they did train in the katas before the kids were given training sabers. They did them empty-handed at Ezra's tender age, but the training was there, and it had one purpose, the most important purpose, the thing that did more to help a Jedi wield a lightsaber than even the Force did.

Ezra knew exactly where his body was at all times. Each joint and muscle, every bony elbow and bit of baby fat, even the end of his shaggy ponytail and the folds of his clothes. The kind of spatial awareness and precise control usually used for tasks as delicate as picking a pocket or long-range slugthrower sharpshooting was being thrown at a game of meadowball, and it meant that Ezra had nearly absolute control over where the ball went. One of the older boys tried to tackle him, but Ezra just rolled through the grab, vaulted over one of his other opponents, and patted the ball with outstretched fingers. It dropped into his goal, and every other boy on the field groaned. 

"No fair, Bridger, you used it!" one of them yelled.

"No, he didn't." Ezra turned and grinned at Caleb's interruption. "He has been practicing, though. I can tell."

"KANAN!" Ezra shrieked, and he hurried over to Caleb. The nickname had started up about a month after he and Master Billaba arrived on Lothal, when he was still marveling over the abrupt, Force-induced certainty that he was going to take on Ezra as a padawan one day. Apparently, the tiny boy had recognized Caleb's hovering protectiveness and immediately decided it reminded him of his grandmother, a sweet old woman who was made very nervous by her Force-sensitive grandson. The two days of being called Caleb-Gramma by a three-year-old that followed had Caleb nearly tearing his hair out before Ezra's parents convinced him that "Gramma" was maybe not preferable to "Nana," more in deference to actual-Gramma's slightly hurt feelings than Caleb's frustration. From there, Ezra, always impatient, had slowly chopped off phonemes: Caleb-Nana became Caleb-Nan became Cale-Nan became Cay-Nan, and just like that Caleb had an extra name.

Ezra smacked into Caleb's waist and hugged him tightly. "You were gone for so long this time, I was scared you weren't coming back!"

Caleb winced. This had been a long absence, nearly a year and a half. He and Master Billaba had spent a whole year the first time, with just a few trips offworld, while they built the Conservatorium and got the families dealing with Force-sensitive two-to-five-year-olds moved close enough to take advantage of the school. After that, Master Billaba had made sure to come back frequently. Lothal loved her, and both she and Caleb found working with the children incredibly soothing, an extra measure of peace that helped soothe battle-weary souls even years after the war.

But when word came in of Master Kenobi's defeat of Maul and the slavers, and of his subsequent exit, with Master Vos, from the Jedi Order, Caleb and Master Billaba had to leave Lothal in a hurry. They'd been engaged in desperate cleanups across the galaxy, working with current and former Jedi. He'd been on a task force with Anakin Skywalker, Mace Windu, Yoda, the Mareks, and and three senators, then he'd been caught in a flareup of violence on Mandalore, then there'd been that epidemic on Raxus, and the civil war on Hecasasa, and after all that, exhausted and just wanting to go back to Lothal, they'd instead been called to Coruscant for a lengthy procedural senate review of their program, and there'd been the Corellian mafia incident, which led to that horrible kriff-up with the gang of Weequay pirates looking for their (incredibly obnoxious) leader, and then he'd gone back to Coruscant _again_ before he finally managed to get a ship back to Lothal. 

It was all so exhausting that he almost didn't care anymore but he still smiled proudly when Ezra yelled "your padawan braid is gone! You're a knight now!"

A couple of the other boys let out appreciative noises and they all flocked around to gawk at Caleb, who, having gotten a haircut, now qualified as a "real" Jedi.

That was how Skywalker's eccentric Togruta ally put it, anyway.

"I am," Caleb said. "It's good to see you again, Ezra. I'm sorry I was gone for so long. I've had a lot of things keeping me very busy for a long time. I missed you."

"I missed you too," Ezra said, and he buried his face in Caleb's tunic in a way that made Caleb suspect he'd had a very hard time without his Kanan. Caleb used the Force to lift Ezra up onto his shoulders so he could take the surprised boy back to his home. Ezra laughed, and the little cloud of sadness that had begun to radiate off of him in the Force cleared up. They'd have to talk about it later, but for now a little bit of happiness and fun was just right.

"Now that you're a knight, am I your padawan?" Ezra asked as they walked, leaning over so that his face entered the top of Caleb's peripheral vision.

"Not yet," Caleb said. "Jedi almost never formally take apprentices younger than nine." A little burst of disappointment, quickly and somewhat guiltily squashed, flitted from Ezra to Caleb. "Of course, that doesn't mean we don't both know you're going to be my padawan."

Ezra wrapped the top of Caleb's head in a tight hug.

+-+

Quinlan was burning another kettle. Obi-Wan could hear him swearing in the kitchen. It was a comfortable sound, his distractable companion having gotten so absorbed in his reading that he completely forgot he was making tea until the kettle was scorching on the stovetop. Obi-Wan made a mental note to invest in a new whistling kettle, and then he turned his attention back to his very stoic, very serious guest.

Across the table from him, Luke Amidala-Skywalker sipped from his boxed fruit juice and said "so, do you agree with me?"

Obi-Wan blinked. "Ah... traditionally, the master chooses the padawan," he pointed out.

The seven-year-old across the table from him nodded sagely, pulled at his juice again, and said, in a tone usually reserved for business meetings, "traditionally, the master isn't retired and living happily on Naboo with his long-term boyfriend."

Obi-Wan made a further mental note to find and deliver justice to whoever had popularized that particular interpretation of his relationship with Quinlan. It wasn't that it was _wrong,_ exactly, it just completely failed to capture the nuances of the situation, and Obi-Wan hated how hearing it described that way made it sound vaguely juvenile.

"Also, I was sort of expecting that _you_ would be my apprentice, not your sister," Obi-Wan admitted. "You've always been so close to me, after all."

Luke nodded smartly. "I know. But I should join the Jedi Order, and Leia shouldn't."

Obi-Wan massaged the bridge of his nose. Force-sensitive twins were rare, but they were common enough that everyone knew they were consistently just a little weirder than most Force-sensitive children. Luke and Leia's particular brand of weird, besides the usual Force bond, was a tendency to predict the future. They'd started out with little things like bringing in guests before they could call for entry, moved up to giving senators unexpected, baffling, and very compelling advice, and finally graduated to working towards a vague ideal future that they couldn't seem to describe except in terms of what "should" happen. 

The whole thing gave Obi-Wan a headache, but following even nonsensical advice from the twins seemed to either do nothing or have positive results (even senator Kiin, who'd sacrificed his entire political career to the twins' strange advice several years back, was now a highly successful poet and apparently very happy, despite the ubiquity of ominous Human children in his works), so he knew better than to discount it. 

"So you're going to find a Jedi to teach you?" Obi-Wan assumed.

Luke nodded. "Yeah, and Papa is already teaching me some, but Galen is gonna be his padawan, everybody knows that. Master Yoda is gonna teach me."

"Does Master Yoda know this?" Obi-Wan asked.

Luke scrunched his tiny face up into a passable wrinkly Yoda-pout and said "always in motion, the future is," in a childish imitation of the old master's voice. He could seem so adult and wise, then suddenly be aggressively _seven_ like that, and it always caught Obi-Wan off guard. He laughed. "Master Yoda won't promise, but he's just stubborn."

Obi-Wan looked out at where Anakin, Padme, and Leia were splashing in one of Naboo's crystal-clear lakes. Amidala-Skywalker family vacations were notorious for being loud and boisterous, and here Luke was, sipping juice with all the seriousness of a politician or Jedi Master. Obi-Wan smiled. "One lesson from me to you, then." He jerked his head at the laughing family outside. "When you're a Jedi, everything seems so serious and important. It's easy to see the whole world that way, and start thinking you have to be like that. Don't. Go have fun, and don't stop having fun when you're older."

"Okay," Luke said, "but you have to come to."

Obi-Wan grinned. "Obviously. Go ahead, and I'll collect your Uncle Quin and we'll all swim together."

Luke stood up, but he didn't manage to get out of the room before Obi-Wan ruffled his hair.

**Author's Note:**

> I am reminded of a joke from the early 2000's:
> 
> Jesus and Satan were arguing one day over who appealed most to young people, and since it was 2002 and the internet was all the rage with contemporary youth, they decided to settle it with a web design contest.
> 
> They sat down, Jesus at his iMac (remember, it was a different time, and Apple was the lesser of two evils), Satan at his Dell (which, for the sake of making him as obviously evil as possible, we will assume was running Windows 10), and began to work while Buddha, who had agreed to judge their contest, put 24 hours on the clock.
> 
> HTML flew, embedded midi files and poorly-looped gifs were thick in the air. Jesus manifested can after can of Mountain Dew, and Satan's infernal minions brought him Red Bull, and it was all terribly tropey. They gathered a crowd of observers, Bacchus and Dionysius were trying to outdo each other with the drinks they brought, and so the Sobek the Crocodile God was so drunk that, with only an hour and a half left in the contest, he tripped and fell into the fuse box, and all the power went out.
> 
> Between Zeus and Odin, they managed to get the power back up in a couple of minutes, but the damage was done. Satan stared in horror at his empty screen, and then glared at Jesus, still typing away, obviously having picked up exactly where he left off.
> 
> "What gives?" Satan growled. "We agreed no miracles!"
> 
> "It's not a miracle, though," Buddha said. "It's just the difference between you two. You see, Jesus saves."
> 
> Be like Jesus. Save your work.


End file.
